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Guy&nbspLyman

Author and Contributor

Based in New Orleans, Guy Lyman is a professional writer with over 25 years’ experience writing about multifamily and commercial real estate. Lyman is a frequent contributor and writer for the Property Management Insider blog.

For the arrival of each generation, student housing operators need to extend the welcome mat long before the key goes in the lock. In recent years, generational preferences made a big leap with Millennials and they continue to evolve with next group leasing student housing. The evolution is affecting the way operators produce and capture[…]

Month after month, year after year, financial close management is a dreary fact of life for real estate accounting staff. While it’s absolutely essential, there is little that’s creative or enjoyable about it. Most companies still handle month-end and year-end closes using Microsoft Excel: 33-year-old software that remains useful, but for this particular task entails[…]

Not content to rest on their laurels, the design team for RealPage’s Commercial Property Management Suite has rolled out a trio of enhancements intended to streamline business for commercial customers. “Our intention was never to just become another player on the commercial side,” says Perry Levine, Industry Principal for RealPage Commercial. “I don’t believe anybody[…]

While we all know that online reviews are important for multifamily marketing, managing them can often be overwhelming. That’s because there are many social media and review venues to monitor for negative reviews and posts you can mitigate and positive ones you can amplify. Few have the time to seek out and pore over everything[…]

It’s an odd fact that small to mid-sized property management companies are less likely to use a formal learning management system (LMS) than are larger companies. Just as with larger businesses, employees are their most expensive and valuable asset, and arming them with both industry knowledge and job-specific training is critical to having them achieve[…]

You’re in the multifamily business, not the computer business. But ask the typical property management company why they manage their own IT – hardware, software, upgrades, tech support and the rest – and they’ll typically offer some combination of the following three reasons: They might be doing it because they believe it saves them money[…]

In the age of intelligent software, producing financial statements still involves a lot more labor than it should for multifamily accounting professionals. That’s because in the property management business, most statements include not just financial performance but operational stats as well: occupancy, move-ins and move-outs and other numbers from the field that provide additional insights[…]

There are unlimited ways to divide people into personality groups, but one of the most common is to separate “introverts” from “extroverts.” You probably know which of these categories you fall into, and it would be wise to consider which category your employees fall into. A learning platform that bridges the gap between the two[…]

In recent weeks, we’ve brought you a series of articles about new executive software tools that can help you squeeze maximum profit from your student housing assets – without any special technical expertise. These tools tap into the data your computer systems are already collecting day in and day out, along with deep market research,[…]

True story: a property manager recently shared that she had broken down in tears when shown how RealPage Business Intelligence for Student Housing could crank out in 10 minutes the reports she had been manually assembling from dozens of individual property spreadsheets—requiring as many as 20 painful hours, a lot of it during her free[…]

Many see employee training as a necessary evil – a boring to-do that interferes with “real” work and often ends up on a back burner, or at best is limited to checking the boxes of required courses completed. But the truth is that an engaging, effective employee training program of ongoing learning is vital to motivating,[…]